Biden open border policy did not vet criminal aliens. how many criminal aliens were allowed into the country becuase they were not properly vetted

Checked on February 4, 2026
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Executive summary

Congressional and advocacy reports offer large but conflicting tallies: Republican House reports and Homeland Committee fact sheets say hundreds of thousands — even millions — of migrants were processed and released with inadequate screening, while independent fact-checkers and DHS lifecycle reports emphasize nuance between “encounters,” expulsions, parole arrivals and who actually remains in the country [1] [2] [3]. The available reporting does not produce a single authoritative number for “criminal aliens allowed in because they were not properly vetted,” but several sources identify roughly 600,000+ non‑detained migrants with criminal records currently on ICE’s docket as of various reporting dates [1] [2].

1. What the major reports actually count and why that matters

House GOP and committee fact sheets frame the problem as a massive failure of vetting, citing millions of “encounters” since FY2021 and describing “mass‑parole” releases that they say bypass thorough screening; those pieces report figures such as nearly 3 million inadmissible encounters in FY2024 and claim ICE’s non‑detained docket contains hundreds of thousands of criminal aliens [1]. A related House Judiciary Republican report states that as of late 2023 more than 617,607 people on ICE’s non‑detained docket had criminal convictions or pending charges and that at least 3.1 million people released since January 2021 had no confirmed departure [2]. Those counts are focused on people on administrative dockets or recorded in nonpublic lifecycle tables, not on an absolute tally of every person who “entered because they were not properly vetted” [4] [2].

2. Independent and corrective perspectives: encounters ≠ admissions

Fact‑checking organizations and migration scholars caution that “encounters” do not equate to successful, permanent entry and stress that many migrants have been expelled, removed, or are repeat crossers; FactCheck.org summarizes DHS lifecycle data showing roughly 2.5 million released into the U.S. versus 2.8 million removed or expelled during a specified period, and CMS notes DHS reported over 4 million returns with 20–25% repeat offenders, which reduces the net population picture [3] [5]. AP reporting on the parole‑by‑air program emphasizes that CBP vets individuals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela and publishes monthly arrival numbers — an example of administration processes that complicate claims of wholesale “no vetting” [6].

3. The narrow, supportable figures: non‑detained docket and criminal‑conviction tallies

Using only the cited sources, the most concrete figures point to the ICE non‑detained docket and GOP estimates of criminal cases: the Homeland Committee cites nearly 650,000 “criminal illegal aliens” currently on ICE’s Non‑Detained Docket in a July 2024 snapshot, and the House Judiciary Republican report identifies about 617,607 people on ICE’s non‑detained docket with criminal convictions or pending charges as of September 2023 [1] [2]. Those numbers describe people known to DHS/ICE with criminal histories who are not in detention; they do not benchmark how many entered specifically because vetting was omitted or inadequate, nor do they indicate whether those listed were admitted lawfully under parole, released pending adjudication, or were re‑entrants after expulsion [1] [2].

4. What cannot be determined from available reporting and the competing agendas

None of the provided sources offers a forensic, single‑metric answer to “how many criminal aliens were allowed into the country because they were not properly vetted”; the datasets conflate encounters, paroles, releases, overstay estimates and non‑detained docket listings and stem from partisan and nonpartisan actors with different aims — House Republican reports highlight enforcement failures and make political claims [1] [2], whereas FactCheck, CMS and AP push back on inflation or misinterpretation of encounter data and document vetting processes in specific parole programs [3] [5] [6]. The resulting, defensible conclusion from the available reporting is that hundreds of thousands of migrants with criminal records appear on ICE’s non‑detained docket across the Biden years, but converting that into a precise count of those “allowed in because they were not properly vetted” is not possible from the cited material [1] [2] [3].

Want to dive deeper?
How does ICE define the non‑detained docket and what processes lead someone with a criminal record to be placed on it?
What are the DHS lifecycle reports and how do they differentiate encounters, releases, expulsions, and removals?
What independent audits or GAO reports exist assessing DHS vetting and parole procedures since 2021?